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I don’t think it’d be unfair to say that it’s been a difficult year for Marvel Netflix. First, there was the costly disaster of Iron Fist, then the shocking news that Marvel would be relocating its streaming rights to a Disney-centric new platform, and finally the very disappointing Defenders, which no one really tuned in for. A lot has gone wrong or Marvel’s streaming service division, continuing the theme of Marvel having a lot of trouble finding lasting success outside the cinematic arena. However, the year isn’t fully over yet and the house of ideas has one last release up their sleeves- The Punisher.
Introduced to the MCU in 2016’s mixed bag of Daredevil season 2, Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is one of the real standouts of Marvel’s Netflix foray alongside season 1’s Kingpin and Krysten Ritter’s Jessica Jones. He pretty much single-handedly made Daredevil season 2 worth watching so his solo series has been long in the anticipation, especially given the cult status afforded to Frank Castle’s previous adaptation Punisher: Warzone. Now, we finally have our first real look at the upcoming series and boy does it leave one wanting.
Let’s start this breakdown with a few personal truths: I am a huge fan of the Punisher- I love the MAX series and I’ve got a good deal of affection for his various weird comic incarnations like the time he was a Frankenstein. He’s a great character and the perfect summation of superheroes as the fantasy of clarity: people do evil and he punishes them, that’s it.
Even in the stories that explore the inhumanity of Frank Castle he’s always benefited from that streamlined approach and the fact it’s fiction so it’s possible to say “he only kills the guilty” and have that be 100% true, all the time.
My second truth is that I have exactly zero confidence in this show ranging above passable and this trailer is honestly really bad. Seriously, I don’t know what happened here other than that this entire enterprise has gotten lost somewhere along the way and completely misinterpreted what the actual appeal of the Punisher is.
What’s more, it’s painfully obvious this trailer wants to evoke the same mood as Logan, which is a fine idea, but I, again, seriously doubt the makers actually grasp why Logan was impactful or engaging.
Let’s start with the big, fat, smothering elephant in the room, the big mistake at the heart of this whole sorry enterprise: re-working the death of Frank Castle’s family to be part of some larger conspiracy. I’ve seen this approach taken a few times in the comics and it’s always the mark of a complete hack. It’s the kind of needlessly byzantine and over-complicated claptrap that completely strangles the life out of Punisher stories.
That’s why I spent a whole paragraph above elaborating on how the simplicity of character is key to the Punisher’s appeal. Nobody actually cares about Frank Castle’s family- we don’t know them and there’s a reason for that, they’re ancillary to the actual enjoyment we find in this character.
See, the deep dark secret of Punisher is that he’s actually a lot like Jason Vorhees or the Terminator or even Samurai Jack- a very boring character all on his own made interesting by being a simplistic block in a complex story. There’s a major misconception that Punisher is only popular because his stories have him shooting a lot of people but if that were actually true we’d be hip deep in massively popular Punisher rip-offs, which we aren’t.
Punisher only works as the true lead of a story if it’s about critiquing revenge fantasies or the way we treat veterans. Otherwise, he’s far better served as an element in a broader story: Punisher on his own isn’t interesting, he’s interesting when he pops into some mob scheme and everyone has to scramble to react to him.
Giving added complexity to his dead family won’t make Frank Castle, murder machine, a more compelling character it just tacks needless baggage to his origin, like when they tried to tie Spider-Man’s origins to Oscorp research in Amazing Spider-Man. I know it seems like I’m harping on this but it’s such a fundamental misstep from an adaptation that got the Punisher SO well in his previous outing it’s kind of flabbergasting.
In Daredevil Season 2, they totally got that the if you make the Punisher the core of a story you need to take a more nuanced and tragic approach to his character. We’ve already got a million and one “guy gets revenge with guns” movies in the Netflix backlog so trying to sell a Punisher story on just “guy gets revenge with guns, but in a skull shirt” wasn’t going to cut it, obviously, but “guys family was killed by overcomplicated conspiracy” was not the answer.
To be fair- I at least see how they came to this conclusion, as misguided as it is. If Punisher can be said to have an archenemy it’d be the military industrial complex so pitting him against the CIA and Homeland Security makes a lot of sense, especially for a Netflix show AKA a 12-hour movie. That was probably always going to be the biggest hurdle for the Punisher show to clear, the fact that he’s a character more inclined to short, contained encounters rather than big, sweeping, movie length adventures. Really, Netflix would probably do well to abandon its policy of telling one long story over a season and adopt smaller 3-4 episode length tales, something more movie length- it probably would’ve helped here.
As far as the actual plot goes, it seems to be that someone in the CIA killed Frank’s family as part of an extended cover-up for black ops stuff he did while in the Middle East. The Punisher vs. CIA approach could be a solid idea here…or it could go horribly wrong, it’s early days yet and I don’t really like what we’ve seen so far. There was a recent plot in the Marvel NOW Punisher comic about Frank becoming embroiled in a conspiracy to enact militarized police because in the superhero universe the cops were never able to convince the government military tech was actually needed.
That would be a solid pitch for the show but I’m not super hopeful as the casting and look of this feels more in line with Tom Clancy plot, specifically something cribbed from the Splinter Cell games. Either way, the big problem that sticks out to me is that it’s a lot less satisfying seeing Frank punish government spooks and conspirators compared to killing rapists and murderers and such.
What’s more disconcerting about the path the Punisher Netflix show looks to be taking is that interpreting audience interest is something Marvel’s usually really good at. They’re actually pretty bad at predicting what people will like, we’ve seen this with the dumb conspiracy stuff in Iron Man 2 or all the sequel set-up in Incredible Hulk.
However, Marvel was smart enough to realize nobody cared about that stuff after the films came out and just abandoned it for greener pastures. The entire failure of the Marvel Netflix offerings has sprung from their unwillingness to change plans, committing to a major team-up show about the least popular character in the entire stable.
Now, with Punisher, they haven’t even managed to register why audiences liked Punisher when he showed up. If Marvel had been this disconnected back in 2010 I doubt we would’ve even made it to Avengers. So there we are, the show that’s meant to get Marvel Netflix back on track and it’s introduced itself by falling face first into the dirt- can we just skip to Jessica Jones season 2?
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